OPENING NIGHT Tuesday 18 November 6pm to 8pm
The title of the exhibition is Assisting Enquiries; some explanation may be in order.
It is routine in crime reporting to state that ‘a person of interest’ is ‘assisting police with their enquiries’. This coy phase is invariably ironic: a suspect is being interrogated, who in all but a few cases is doing their best not to ‘assist’ their interrogators; they falsify, elide facts, obfuscate.
For want of a better term, I think of these works as instruments; but it may be asked, to what purpose? Before anything else, an instrument is something that is used by an agent to effect a given purpose or end. In other words, it is the means by which we achieve agency. Most observers will intuit that these objects have their origins in devices used to measure, to map, and to model, equipment designed to enable a certain form of agency, a particular way understanding the world. To the non-specialist their function may be obscure, but we inhabit worlds, physical, intellectual, cultural- that they have enabled. The ‘function’ of these sculptures is to interrogate the formal qualities associated with the machinery of this enterprise, and at the same time be open to interpretation, particularly in regard to how we assay the results of the quest for power over this world.
Conservators rail against ‘fugitive colours’, those pigments that are eclipsed by more stable ones. In an analogous way, certain ideas, often elevated into paradigms, fade from view; but they leave traces behind in any and all cultures. A part of this residue is the starting point for these objects.
- Cliff Burtt 2025
